News & Events

It is with great pain that the IASS board came to the decision to cancel the annual conference in Tokyo, due to the current outbreak of Coronavirus.

Refunds for registration and dinner will be processed soon. We cannot refund the fees that PayPal charges.

Individual participants will be responsible for their own cancellations and refunds of transportation and accomodation.

We regret any inconvenience this cancellation may cause. And we surely hope we can see each other soon enough in another event.

The IASS board would also recognize and deeply thank the local organizers for all the hard work they did both in organizing a conference that had a remarkably wonderful program, and in handling all the difficulties due to the consequences of the Coronavirus.

Registration for the upcoming International Adam Smith Society Tokyo conference on March 15-17, 2020 is now open!

More information about registration, the conference itself, and lodging can be found on our IASS site: IASS 2020 Tokyo

Registration will only be open until the end of January 2020, so be sure to register as soon as you can!

The Adam Smith Review – the journal of the International Adam Smith Society – will also publish a special issue of selected papers from the Tokyo conference. Conference participants will receive guidelines on how to prepare their papers for submission and review at the close fo the Tokyo conference.

The band the “Benevolent Dictators” (who have previously released music on Smith) have an “impartial spectator” t-shirt available for $17.59 on their website for those interested Smith or Benevolent Dictator fans!

The deadline for the IASS Tokyo conference is only 9 days away! Make sure to submit your abstracts as soon as possible.

Submission Deadline:August 10, 2019

The review committee will make every effort to notify authors of acceptance decisions by September 30, 2019. A preliminary program should be available by December 2019.

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The University of Tokyo, Hongo Campus invites submissions for the 2020 IASS Tokyo Conference. The conference will bring together scholars working on Smith from across the globe and will aim to build on the success of the Smith Society’s recent meetings in Southern California, Chile, Scotland, and Italy. The conference will be held in Tokyo, March 15-17, 2020.

The conference will be hosted by Political Economy Workshop (Graduate School of Economics, University of Tokyo). cosponsored by the Japanese Society for the History of Economic Thought, and Adam Smith Society (Japan).

A special exhibition of books belonging to Adam Smith will be held during or immediately after the conference. The collection was donated to the University by Prof. Inazo Nitobe in 1920, and has been collected by the Resources and Historical Collections Office of the University of Tokyo. The collection holds 315 Smith’s books.

Proposals for author meets critics sessions to discuss books that have been published in the last two years (or that are forthcoming) are also encouraged. Proposers of such sessions should solicit interest in participating from the author and at least two critics prior to submission.

More information about registration and a conference website will be posted soon. We hope to see you in Tokyo next year!

We accept a session request via form once, only when all information is complete. We do not accept session requests without FULL PROGRAM INFORMATION. We do not reserve session slots.

Please read below for what information you will need to submit a session request via form.

The deadline for your program is October 14.

Using the Form to Request a Session

The deadline for submitting a session request is October 14. Requests are honored on a first-come, first-served basis and only when all information is complete. We do not accept session requests without FULL PROGRAM INFORMATION. We do not reserve session slots.

If you do not yet have FULL PROGRAM INFORMATION for the session you are requesting, including all participants’ names, affiliations, state/province of affiliation, email addresses, and titles for talks, please DO NOT complete the form. Please do not use an acronym for your affiliated group, as there are several hundred affiliated groups.

Space in the Westin St. Francis is tight, which limits our flexibility in scheduling. We aim to accommodate all session requests, and to do our best to accommodate scheduling requests, but we are more constrained this year than is typical. Early submissions will get scheduling priority, all else being equal.

Groups may request one three-hour session, one two-hour session, or two two-hour sessions. In other words, groups may not request two three-hour sessions. If two sessions are requested, both must be two hours in length.

If you are requesting two, two-hour sessions, please complete the form TWICE, once for your first session, and once for your second session.

What Full Information you will Need to Request a Session

Groups may request one three-hour session, one two-hour session, or two two-hour sessions. In other words, groups may not request two three-hour sessions. If two sessions are requested, both must be two hours in length.

Affiliated Group sessions may be scheduled for the following times: W/Th/Sat: 6-8, 6-9, 8-10, F: 7-9, 7-10.

Please indicate your preferences for scheduling, keeping in mind that while we do our best to accommodate scheduling requests, not all requests can be accommodated. Please indicate which session is your top priority for scheduling if you propose two.

Session information will not be accepted until it is complete in every particular.

You may indicate a topic for each session.

Your request must include the following for each chair, speaker, and commentator on your program:

The University of Tokyo, Hongo Campus invites submissions for the 2020 IASS Tokyo Conference. The conference will bring together scholars working on Smith from across the globe and will aim to build on the success of the Smith Society’s recent meetings in Southern California, Chile, Scotland, and Italy. The conference will be held in Tokyo, March 15-17, 2020.

The conference will be hosted by Political Economy Workshop (Graduate School of Economics, University of Tokyo). cosponsored by the Japanese Society for the History of Economic Thought, and Adam Smith Society (Japan).

A special exhibition of books belonging to Adam Smith will be held during or immediately after the conference. The collection was donated to the University by Prof. Inazo Nitobe in 1920, and has been collected by the Resources and Historical Collections Office of the University of Tokyo. The collection holds 315 Smith’s books.

Proposals for author meets critics sessions to discuss books that have been published in the last two years (or that are forthcoming) are also encouraged. Proposers of such sessions should solicit interest in participating from the author and at least two critics prior to submission.

Submission Deadline: August 10, 2019

The review committee will make every effort to notify authors of acceptance decisions by September 30, 2019. A preliminary program should be available by December 2019.

More information about registration and a conference website will be posted soon. We hope to see you in Tokyo next year!

The International Adam Smith Society will sponsor a session at the 7th Latin American Conference of the History of Economic Thought organized by the Latin American Society for the History of Economic Thought – Asociación Latinoamericana de Historia del Pensamiento Económico (ALAHPE) – to be held at Federal University of Paraná – Universidade Federal do Paraná (UFPR) – in Curitiba, Brazil on November 20-22, 2019.

If you are interested in presenting a paper on Adam Smith or on an Adam Smith related theme and would like to be included in the session, please send an abstract of your paper to Maria Pia Paganelli at mpaganel@trinity.edu by June 1, 2019.

We’ve put together an exciting program featuring some of the world’s leading Smith scholars. The program will include keynote lectures from Professors Vernon Smith and Fonna Forman. In addition to the keynote lectures the program will also include approximately two dozen plenary sessions and several author meets critics sessions for recently published or forthcoming books.

The meeting will begin on the morning of Friday January 18th, and will conclude just before lunch on Sunday January 20th. Participants should register here as soon as possible.

The Liberty Fund, with support from a generous grant from the John Templeton Foundation, has launched a new website, “Adam Smith Works,” devoted to Smith and Smith scholarship. The website has excellent resources for educators, including a text repository and a scholars’ portal for members. We encourage you to check out the site and to share it widely.

IASS member Sule Ozler shares news of a new book published with her colleague Paul Gabrinetti:

Ozler, S., & Gabrinetti, P. A. (2018). Psychoanalytic Studies of the Work of Adam Smith: Towards a Theory of Moral Development and Social Relations. Taylor & Francis.

A book description and reviews can be found at the Routledge website here and this is the Amazon link. The table of contents follows below.

Table of contents

Chapter 1. Introduction
Chapter 2. An intersubjective interpretation of sympathy
Chapter 3. Sympathy, empathy and evidence from developmental psychology
Chapter 4. The impartial spectator conscience and morality
Chapter 5. The role of the Deity in Smith’s moral system
Chapter 6. A known world: an analysis of defenses in Adam Smith’s the Theory of Moral
Sentiments
Chapter 7. Defenses and morality: Adam smith, Sigmund Freud and Contemporary
Psychoanalysis
Chapter 8. An evolutionary psychological and adaptive defenses view of relations between
markets and morality
Chapter 9. On dependency
Chapter 10. On friendship
Chapter 11. A Jungian interpretation of the place of women in Smith’s works
Chapter 12. Conclusions